i've seen that said so many times, and fail to understand why Ruby syntax brings joy.

Personally, I thought the muddled Proc, block, and lambda situation a mess, coming from Scheme 30 years ago to Ruby 20 years ago.

Well it would seem very messy coming from Scheme!

Scheme is a small language which achieves expressiveness by allowing you great freedom to push the language into bold new forms.

Ruby (especially with Rails which should almost be considered a separate language) is a big language where simplicity is maintained by informal convention.

Ruby has lots of muddles and messy features, good Ruby code bypasses them.

Ruby was among the first languages I learned, back when there was the possibility of Ruby being a general purpose language and not just Rails. My joy was the result of being able to guess syntax and be right. Nowadays I value reading documentation and IDE level support, so guessing syntax is no longer a joy.

When I saw it, I felt the same way (also using Scheme a lot) and I still feel it is messy. However, what I think might be the reason for it, is that it is difficult to store a lambda in Scheme including its whole environment in an object and send that over the wire somewhere else, on a different machine to run. Perhaps distinguishing between Proc, block and lambda gives Ruby a possibility to treat one of them specially, so that it can do these things easily?

I can gladly point out that Crystal has a much cleaned up syntax for blocks and procs (compared to Ruby): https://crystal-lang.org/reference/1.5/syntax_and_semantics/...

> Personally, I thought the muddled Proc, block, and lambda situation a mess

Why not use one (probably just block) for everything? Coming from ruby 10 years ago.

Blocks can't be stored in variables.

Yes, I don't store them in variables, but I can expand them in generators and yield them. To me, that is much more useful than storing them.

I guess those things are a compromise. Being able to use that concept easily is a joy. The implementation prioritises developer convenience over syntactic purity. It’s a shame we can’t have both, but I accept the trade-off.

That's quite a minor nitpick on an entire language that's been around for over 25 years.

I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder because I look at that syntax and cringe.

What about it makes you cringe?

This kind of thing

            End
          End
        End
      End
    End

While it is not completely impossible to end up (pun intended) with something like this, you usually follow a coding style that avoids it. Kind of like in Ruby.

You have the option to define named methods that yield or to use the short one-parameter syntax where this:

  method do |param|
    param.some_method
  end

becomes

  method &.some_method

I get no joy from Ruby syntax. Haskell syntax on the other hand I love...

Same argument that I keep on having with people who like 1. gray and darker gray buildings of a tree-less megacity beautiful, with a dash of color vs 2. those who find small cities/villages mixed with art, trees & colourfully dressed people beautiful.